Our Team
Jose Chavez
I am a 5th year Mechanical Engineering student. I enjoy spending time with friends, fishing, and watching movies.
Brennen Irey
I am a 4th year Mechanical Engineering student. I enjoy tinkering, 3D printing, and working on anything with an engine in it.
Jack Cerron
I am 3rd year transfer ME student with a General Concentration. I enjoy working on challenging project and getting my hands dirty.
James Popolow
I am a 5th year Mech E. student with a Concentration in Mechatronics and a Minor in CS. I enjoy reading, tinkering, and spending time with friends
Our Sponsor
Dr. Lauren Cooper is a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at Cal Poly. She worked in the renewable energy industry before returning to academia as a professor. Her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a specialty in Engineering Education and her ongoing research into improving engineering education are testament to her passion as an educator.
Project Videos
Project OVerview
Guided Activity Demonstration
Project Information
Problem Statement
Professor Cooper, and other ME 329 professors, need a way to teach students power train design concepts in an interactive, hands-on way that shows the application of the concepts to real-world systems. These laboratory activities should be easy to use, low in cost, durable, and provide students with an exploratory and learning experience using quality parts that will focus on gears, shafts, and bearings. They should produce measurable results in response to changing parameters. It should also help them through a design activity that will model a real-world scenario.
Project Specifications
Customer needs:
- • Safe and easy to use for students
- • Interactive with measurable outputs
- • Applicable to the real world
Customer wants:
- • Manufacturable by student shop techs on site
- • Composed of off-the-shelf, industrial level parts
- • Robust and maintainable
Project Scope
We made the following three decisions to define the focus of our project:
- 1. We will focus on concepts related to gears, gear trains, and power transmission systems.
- 2. The best solution would be a three-activity series consisting of an Exploration Activity, a Demonstration Activity, and a Design Challenge, but we will focus on the Exploration and Design Activities.
- 3. We will develop learning objectives and lesson plans to accompany the physical apparatuses for each activity
Research
We gained several key insights from interviewing Professor Cooper at the beginning of the project:
• Students sometimes have difficulty connecting lab activities with real world applications
• Most existing lab activities are either not hands-on, feel like a toy, or are too abstracted from industry application
• An activity related to wind turbines might be great for both Dr. Cooper and students
• The best topics to cover would be gears, gear trains, and/or fasteners
• Quality of parts are not as important as the context of the lab experiment
Ideation
1. Create a functional decomposition
2. Ideating on solutions for each function
3. Modelling the best ideas
4. Evaluating through Pugh and weighted decision matrices
5. Selecting the scoring design components and compiling them into the best design
We settled on a two-step solution: Exploration Activity + Design Challenge
Design Verification
We originally set our noise limit for specification #9 at 60 dB as this was the level at which normal conversation starts to become affected according to our research. However, upon testing our motors, which give off ~65dB at a distance of 1 foot, we noted that the noise levels were not uncomfortable and did not interfere with our conversation. We decided to adjust our noise specification criteria to a max of 85dB which is the OSHA limit for safe exposure over an 8 hour work day without hearing protection.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our project advisor, Dr. Peter Schuster, for supporting and guiding us throughout this project. We would also like to thank Meredith Gruben for handling all purchasing of required components and materials. Finally, thank you to the many professors, students, family and friends who provided feedback throughout the project.